State Supreme Court to Review Libel Suit Ruling Against Critic

The state Supreme Court, accepting its second libel case in the past week, agreed Thursday to review a lower court ruling that a critic could be sued for harshly criticizing a television show.

All seven justices agreed to hear the case, which involves the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and Peter Bunzel, who was one of its television critics.

In a column appearing in December, 1983, Bunzel wrote that his “impression” was that the producer of a show on sex education decided to use the program to “pour on titillating innuendo and as much bare flesh as we can get away with.”

A libel suit brought by the producer, Walter Baker, a vice president at KHJ-TV in Los Angeles, was thrown out by a Superior Court judge, who cited long-standing law that critics have a constitutional right to express their opinions without fear of a libel suit.

But last November, a split Court of Appeal reinstated the suit, ruling that the column was “vitriolic criticism,” which “in effect” accused Baker of “intentional presentation of pornography, obscenity and lewdness.”

The Supreme Court voted last week to review another libel case in which the San Francisco Examiner and two reporters were ordered to pay $4.6 million in damages. The suit, brought by a prosecutor and two police officers, was over a series of articles saying that a youth was wrongly convicted of murder.

In another case Thursday, the court let stand without comment rulings by lower courts that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power does not have to produce environmental impact reports each year when it decides on the amount of water to pump from Mono Lake.